Success Is Official: Russian Team Breaches Buried Antarctic Lake

Image: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center - Scientific Visualization Studio; Canadian Space Agency; and RADARSAT International Inc.

It's official. Russian scientists announced today that they have reached Antarctica's Lake Vostok, an ancient, liquid lake the size of Lake Ontario buried beneath more than 2 miles (3 kilometers) of ice for at least 14 million years.

The revelation comes after days of speculation on whether the years-long effort had finally achieved its goal.

News of the scientific milestone was evidently on hold, as Russian headquarters waited on some measurements from Vostok Station, the tiny outpost in the middle of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet where the Russians have been drilling toward Lake Vostok since the late 1990s.

In fact, just after 9 a.m. local time (12 a.m. ET), Sergei Lesenkov, a spokesman for Russia's Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute, based in St. Petersburg, told OurAmazingPlanet that the team was still awaiting some final numbers from Antarctica.

We are waiting for information which will allow us to confirm this result," Lesenkov said. He said that it appeared lake water had shot dozens of meters up into the long borehole, but that an announcement would likely come on Thursday morning, local time.

Yet it appears the Vostok team came through faster than expected, and Russia announced to the world that it had reached Lake Vostok just a few hours later.

The team's ice-coring drill broke through the slushy layer of ice at the bottom of the massive ice sheet and reached fresh, liquid lake water on Feb. 5, at a depth of 12,366 feet (3,769 meters) according to the press release issued today by the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute

Scientists suspect that the massive lake could house cold-loving organisms uniquely adapted to live in the darkness under the ice. The lake has been cut off from the outside world since the ice sheet covered it ? as long as 34 million years ago, or, according to the most modest estimates, 14 million years ago. [Antarctica's Biggest Mysteries]

Contamination concerns
Some scientists have expressed concern over the drill method the Russians are using at Lake Vostok. Their ice-coring drill, which was originally designed to bore deep into the ice sheet and bring back long tubes of ice for climate research, uses what is essentially jet fuel to keep the long borehole from freezing over season after season, and there are fears that the fuel will contaminate the lake, or at least the lake water samples retained for research.

The Russians have maintained that, because the Freon, kerosene and other hydrocarbons in the drill fluid are less dense than water, that they will be pushed up through the borehole and will never touch the lake. Today's press release states that this has indeed been the case, and that drill fluid was pushed up and away from the lake itself and into sealed containers.

Drilling began at Vostok Station in the 1970s, before there was any inkling that one of the largest lakes on Earth lay beneath the site, and the drill the Vostok team is using wasn't built to retrieve lake water. It can only fetch ice, thus the team won't be able to actually get their hands on water samples and test them for life until next season ? the water must be left to freeze in the borehole over the austral winter.

Alive and well?
Several scientists have said that even if the Russians don't find evidence of living organisms in the samples they bring back from Vostok, there's no reason to believe the lake is a dead zone.

Source: http://rss.sciam.com/click.phdo?i=ef188efa75cc32cb322b55d14c487a50

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